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and then, as a last resort, called the Boise police. I carefully explained my problem to the sergeant at the other end, a man named Neil Armstrong. The following day, Sergeant Armstrong called back with the news. Uncle Victor had been found dead at his lodgings on North Twelfth Street—slumped in a chair with his overcoat on, a half-assembled clarinet locked in the fingers of his copy hand. Two packed suitcases had been standing by the door. The room was searched, but the authorities had turned up nothing to suggest foul play. According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report, heart attack was the probable cause of death. “Tough luck, kid,” the sergeant added, “I’m really sorry.”
    I flew out West the next morning to make the arrangements. I identified Victor’s body at the morgue, paid off debts, signed papers and forms, prepared to have the body shipped home to Chicago. The Boise mortician was in despair over the state of the corpse. After languishing in the apartment for almost a week, there wasn’t much to be done with it. “If I were you,” he said to me, “I wouldn’t expect any miracles.”
    I set up the funeral by telephone, contacted a few of Victor’sfriends (Howie Dunn, the broken-nosed saxophonist, a number of former students), made a half-hearted attempt to reach Dora (she couldn’t be found), and then accompanied the casket back to Chicago. Victor was buried next to my mother, and the sky pelted us with rain as we stood there watching our friend disappear into the earth. Afterward, we drove to the Dunns’ house on the North Side, where Mrs. Dunn had prepared a modest spread of cold cuts and hot soup. I had been weeping steadily for the past four hours, and in the house I quickly downed five or six double bourbons along with my food. It bcopyened my spirits considerably, and after an hour or so I began singing songs in a loud voice. Howie accompanied me on the piano, and for a while the gathering became quite raucous. Then I threw up on the floor, and the spell was broken. At six o’clock, I said my good-byes and lurched out into the rain. I wandered blindly for two or three hours, threw up again on a doorstep, and then found a thin, gray-eyed prostitute named Agnes standing under an umbrella on a neon-lit street. I accompanied her to a room in the Eldorado Hotel, gave her a brief lecture on the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, and then sang lullabies to her as she took off her clothes and spread her legs. She called me a lunatic, but then I gave her a hundred dollars, and she agreed to spend the night with me. I slept badly, however, and at four a.m. I slipped out of bed, climbed into my wet clothes, and took a taxi to the airport. I was back in New York by ten o’clock.
    I n the end, the problem was not grief. Grief was the first cause, perhaps, but it soon gave way to something else—something more tangible, more calculable in its effects, more violent in the damage it produced. A whole chain of forces had been set in motion, and at a certain point I began to wobble, to fly in greater and greater circles around myself, until at last I spun out of orbit.
    The fact was that my money situation was deteriorating. I had been aware of this for some time, but until now the threat had loomed only in the far distance, and I had not given it any seriousthought. On the heels of Uncle Victor’s death, however, and the thousands of dollars I had spent during those terrible days, the budget that was supposed to see me through college had been blown to smithereens. Unless I did something to replace the money, I would not make it to the end. I computed that if I went on spending at my current rate, my funds would be exhausted by November of my senior year. And by that I meant everything: every nickel, every dime, every penny copy down to the bottom.
    My first impulse was to quit college, but after toying with the idea for a day or two, I thought better of it. I had promised my uncle that I would